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She drew very well and was interested in graphic arts,
including various printmaking mediums. She also
studied painting at the Massachusetts College of Art.
In 1991, Fago moved to her family's home in
Vermont, and not long after, a friend sent her some
buttons made from a colorful plastic material. She was
smitten and went out to purchase her first polymer
clay. She read the manual that came with it and was
soon experimenting with this flexible modeling clay
that had recently been adopted by jewelers. Up until
this time, Fago had never worked in jewelry. She had
spent a summer at Penland when she was sixteen, but
the session was meant to introduce artists to the
she felt something was missing. The material felt too
light, both in actual weight and aesthetically. "A piece
of polymer clay jewelry that is absolutely stunning in a
photograph," she points out, "feels light when you
actually handle it." To her, the material lacked
gravitas. What it needed was more weight.
Fago "beat the bushes" for a metalsmithing class.
She knew nothing about metal at the time. Indeed, she
is embarrassed to recall wondering how one could cut
a shape out of a metal sheet. What tools would be
used? The League of New Hampshire Craftsmen's
Craft Studies program in Hanover proved to be the
answer. The studio was (and still is) run by Kerstin
concept of "living their lives through crafts" rather
than to serve as a study of any single craft.
Fago felt that she could do something with the
polymer clay. The material had the form and color in
one malleable, willing material—and it satisfied what
she felt was a long-time, if secret, longing: to work in
three dimensions. Using wood gouges from her
mother's printmaking kit from the 1940s, she carved
into the baked material and rubbed paint in the
carved lines. An early lizard pendant in polymer clay
shows her remarkable sense of design.
At the time, jewelry in polymer clay was somewhat
"unfledged." There were a handful of artists doing
interesting work in the medium in jewelry, including
Cynthia Toops, Nan Roche and Tory Hughes. While
Fago followed advances in the medium with interest,
Nichols, a classically trained metalsmith—"a
wonderful teacher and jeweler," says Fago. She took
workshops and classes with Nichols for years and
apprenticed to her. Fago learned as much about
metalsmithing as she could, recognizing that the
artform takes years to master. She learned some
fundamentals that enabled her to progress in her
jewelry. She quickly began to combine metal with
clay; the settings for a stunning ibis pendant were
made in the metals studio at the league.
In the late 1990s, jeweler and author Tim
McCreight invited Fago to Haystack to teach a
workshop in polymer clay. While seated in the dining
hall one day, McCreight took two packets of Precious
Metal Clay from his pocket and pushed them across
the table. If, as Fago jokes, polymer clay was the
HOLLOW FORM BOX BRACELET of sterling silver, eighteen and twenty-four karat gold (keum-boo), 2002. POLYMER INLAY RING of fine silver,
sterling silver (ring shank), polymer clay, brass, 2011.
51 ORNAMENT 37.1.2013
The Vermont-based jeweler is a master at combining polymer
clay, PMC and metalsmithing to create new designs.